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Saturday, July 11, 2009

Too Many Italian Restaurants?

I like Italian food, but most cities seem to have an oversupply of Italian restaurants compared to other types of ethnic food (as defined relative to the U.S. food market).

To test this perception, I analyzed OpenTable’s categorized listings of restaurants for Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Italian was the top ethnic category by far, comprising nearly 18% of listed restaurants. A distant second was French at 6.6%. Next was Japanese at 3%. Mexican, Indian, and Thai were each farther down the list, below 2%.

Which begs the question: Does the populace really want three or six or ten Italian restaurants for every French, Japanese, or Indian restaurant, respectively?

Some caveats about the data:

I ignored the American categories due to their home-team advantage in the United States.

The categories are not cleanly separated. For example, Japanese and Sushi are distinct categories, but apparently a restaurant can only be in one category. So we might safely say that the 3% figure for Japanese is actually 4.4% when we add the Sushi restaurants. Similarly, French could pick up an incremental 1.1% if combined with Contemporary French.

OpenTable is a service for restaurant reservations, so it lists higher-end restaurants. That explains the low numbers for a category like Chinese, which has a lot of casual and take-out restaurants.

These and other factors undoubtedly messed with the numbers. But unless the data was totally whacked, the magnitude of the differences between Italian and the other categories seems large enough to point to something real.

I initially thought the same about the pizza factor. However, I looked at a sample of the Italian restaurants in Manhattan. Pure pizza places did not seem to comprise much of the list, probably because OpenTable is only for restaurants that take reservations.